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Finding Content

Chat

How to use Chat with Library in pinakea

Chat is where pinakea becomes more than a reader. Instead of opening individual documents and scanning them yourself, you ask a question — and pinakea answers it using everything in your library, with citations pointing back to the original sources.

What you can do with chat

The most natural way to use chat is to ask questions you’d otherwise spend minutes (or hours) tracking down manually:

  • “What were the key decisions from last week’s email threads?” — pinakea pulls from your ingested emails and synthesizes an answer.
  • “Summarize everything I’ve saved about container gardening” — works across web clippings, notes, and documents at once.
  • “What did the Q2 budget discussion conclude?” — finds relevant items even if they’re scattered across different sources and dates.
  • “Compare what these three articles say about battery technology” — select the items first, then ask.

Chat works best when you’re looking for synthesis, connections, or answers that span multiple items. For simple lookups, search is faster. For deep understanding, chat is the tool.

Starting a conversation

Open the Chat tab in the sidebar, type your question, and press Return. That’s it.

What chat searches depends on your current context — and this is one of its most powerful features. If you’ve selected a single item, chat focuses on that item and includes the full source text when it fits DeepSeek’s context budget. If you’ve committed a search, chat uses only the filtered results. If nothing is selected or filtered, chat searches across all your items and retrieves the most relevant passages. This means you can narrow or broaden chat’s scope just by changing what you’re looking at in the timeline. See Scope and Context for the full details.

If you paste a pinakea item link into a prompt, chat treats that item as an explicit source for the answer and includes the linked source directly when it fits. This works for current pinakea://item/... links and older ona-uno://item/... / clarity://item/... links. Follow-up questions in the same chat keep the linked item in context, so you do not need to paste the link again.

You can also start a chat directly from a selection or search result — no need to switch tabs first.

Citations and verification

Every chat response includes numbered citations that link back to the source items pinakea used. Click a citation to jump to that item in the timeline and read its summary. Option-click (Alt-click) a citation to open the original source directly — the actual file, web page, or email. For YouTube transcript answers, timestamped citations are linked too; if an answer contains plain timestamp ranges from one unambiguous YouTube source, pinakea links those timestamps to that video. In multi-source or multi-video answers, only source-numbered timestamp citations are linked. Clicking a YouTube timestamp selects the source item and opens the timestamped video URL in the browser.

This is important: chat answers are only as good as the context they draw from. Citations let you verify claims against the original material whenever accuracy matters.

Chat history and export

pinakea keeps your chat sessions so you can return to them later. Click the history button to load, rename, or delete previous sessions. Each session also has a deep link you can copy — useful for jumping back to a specific conversation from outside the app.

When you manually load a previous session from History, pinakea restores the saved messages and filters the timeline to the source items that were stored with that chat, including sessions that originally started as Chat with Library.

If pinakea reopens with the Chat pane remembered, it restores saved chat sessions reliably, including older migrated sessions whose context has to be rebuilt from stored references. A normal Chat with Library session still reopens in library scope and does not force the timeline into retrieval mode.

When you want to take a conversation with you, use the export button to save it as a Markdown transcript, optionally including the source citations.

DeepSeek and embeddings

pinakea uses DeepSeek V4 Flash for online chat and long summaries. DeepSeek chat uses reasoning, which is why you may see a short “Thinking…” state before the final answer appears.

The same online text model is also used for generated titles, summaries, tags, and AI tag consolidation. Embeddings use Qwen3 Embedding 8B, so semantic search and chat retrieval share a consistent online embedding space.

When you use online chat, pinakea requests OpenRouter Zero Data Retention routing. The request goes from your Mac to OpenRouter and the provider using your own OpenRouter key; it does not pass through pinakea servers.

What counts toward the Free monthly limit

Chat is available on Free, Pro Monthly, and Pro Lifetime. It does not spend the Free monthly processing allowance.

The monthly processing limit applies after the trial only when AI enrichment starts for a new item:

  • embeddings,
  • AI-generated title,
  • automatic summary.

Chat with Library, Chat with Knowledge Base, day/daypart summaries, loading previous chat history, canceled requests, and failed requests do not spend the monthly processing allowance.

When the Free monthly processing limit is reached, your content remains readable and chat remains available. New over-limit items stay keyword-searchable by original title and raw content, then wait for AI enrichment until the next reset or a Pro upgrade.

You can see your remaining monthly processing allowance in the status bar.

For the complete list of what counts and what stays free, see Paid Features.